Dubai, located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has become a bustling, metropolis, and a major business hub in the Persian Gulf region. “My first impression of Dubai was that of super-tall buildings jutting out of the desert sand,” writes Rob Whitworth, the creator of the film above. “Dubai may be home to the world’s most outrageous skyline,” but there’s more to it than that. After “3 months of exploration, research and filming,” Whitworth continues, “my lasting impression is of the eternal wonder of the desert and the importance it holds for the Emirati people.” Skyscrapers and desert dunes, they both get captured in the photographer’s fast moving short film called “Dubai Flow Motion” — a film which, as Petapixel rightly notes, takes “hyperlapses to the next level.” Watch and you’ll see what they mean.
One particularly distressing hallmark of late modernity can be characterized as a cultural loss of the future. Where we once delighted in imagining the turns civilization would take hundreds and even thousands of years ahead—projecting radical designs, innovative solutions, great explorations, and peculiar evolutionary developments—we now find the mode of forecasting has grown apocalyptic, as climate change and other catastrophic, man-made global phenomena make it difficult to avoid some very dire conclusions about humanity’s impending fate. We can add to this assessment the loss of what we may call the “long view” in our day-to-day lives.
As the Long Now Foundation co-founder Stewart Brand describes it, “civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span,” driven by “the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking.”
Such is the texture of modern existence, and though we may run our hands over it daily, remarking on how tightly woven the fabric is, we seem to have few-to-no mechanisms for unweaving—or even loosening—the threads. Enter the Long Now Foundation and its proposal of “both a mechanism and a myth” as a means encouraging “the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility.”
Inspired by computer scientist Daniel Hill’s idea for a Stonehenge-sized clock that “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium,” the foundation proposes a number of projects and guidelines for restoring long-term thinking, including “minding mythic depth,” “rewarding patience,” and “allying with competition.” The clock, initially a thought experiment, is becoming a reality, as you can see in the short video above, with a massive, “monument scale” version under construction in West Texas and scale prototypes in London and the Long Now Foundation’s San Francisco headquarters. Largely a symbolic gesture, the “10,000 year clock,” as it’s called, has been joined with another, eminently practical undertaking reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica—a “library of the deep future.”
One wing of this library, the Manual for Civilization, aims to compile a collection of 3,500 books in the Foundation’s physical space—books deemed most likely to “sustain or rebuild civilization.” To begin the project, various future-minded contributors have been asked to make their own lists of books to add. The first list comes from musician/composer/producer/musical futurist and founding board member Brian Eno, who named the foundation. Other notable contributors include Long Now Foundation president Stewart Brand and board member and co-founder of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly. Below, see the first ten titles from each of these futurist’s lists, and further down, links to the full list of contributors’ selections so far. As you scan the titles below, and browse through each contributor’s list, consider why and how each of these books would help humanity rebuild civilization, and suggest books of your own in the comments.
10 Titles from Brian Eno’s Manual for Civilization list
Once again, these are only excerpts from longer lists by these three futuristic thinkers. For their complete selections, click on their lists below, as well as those from such cultural figures as sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson and Brain Pickings’ editor Maria Popova. And please let us know: Which books would you include in the “Manual for Civilization” library project, and why? You can also add your own suggestions for the growing library at the Long Now Foundation’s website.
I often wonder just how I would have done my job(s) before the advent of an internet that puts more or less whatever information I might need right at my fingertips. The answer, of course, applies to any question about how we did things in an earlier technological era: we would’ve had to talk to someone. Some of us would’ve had to talk to a librarian, just like the ones The New York Public Library has employed (and continues to employ) to research and respond to any questions people need answered.
The internet, as it happens, has loved #letmelibrarianthatforyou, the hashtag the New York Public Library started using on Instagram to identify the unusual such questions it fielded in the 20th century. Their recent discovery of a box of notecards filled with preserved questions from the 1940s through the 80s, photographs of which they now post on a regular basis, has provided a clear window onto the human curiosity of days past — or rather, the instances of human curiosity that librarians found curious enough to preserve in their box labeled “interesting research questions” and kept behind the desk.
Search technology, of course, hasn’t yet made human consultants of every kind obsolete; there are more Googleable and less Googleable questions, after all. Examples of the former include 1962’s “What is the gestation of human beings in days?” (“I was born on 1/29/62,” replies one commenter. “Maybe my mother was getting impatient!”), 1966’s query about whether Jules Verne wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the undated “Are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates the same person?”
Some patrons, on the other end of the spectrum, preferred to ask the unanswerable: one needed the solution to “the riddle of existence,” and another called in pursuit of The Oxford Ornithology of American Literature. Even if the librarians couldn’t help out these inquisitive people of the mid-20th century, I do hope they found a way to satiate your curiosity. It almost makes me want to see what modern humanity is Googling right now. Wait, no — I said “almost.”
Blank on Blank returns this week with another one of their groovy animations. This time, we find Lou Reed recalling the goals and ambitions of his avant-garde rock band, The Velvet Underground. We wanted, he says, “to elevate the rock n’ roll song, to take it where it hadn’t been taken before.” And, in his humble opinion, they did just that, far exceeding the musical output of contemporary bands like The Doors and The Beatles, which he respectively calls “stupid” and “garbage.” If you listen to the complete interview recorded in 1987 (web — iTunes), you’ll hear Lou diss a lot of bands. But which one did he give props to? U2. Go figure.
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It’s time, again, for Edge.org’s annual question. The 2015 edition asks 187 accomplished (and in some cases celebrated) thinkers to answer the question: What Do You Think About Machines That Think?
John Brockman, the literary über agent and founder of Edge.org, fleshes the question out a bit, writing:
In recent years, the 1980s-era philosophical discussions about artificial intelligence (AI)—whether computers can “really” think, refer, be conscious, and so on—have led to new conversations about how we should deal with the forms that many argue actually are implemented. These “AIs”, if they achieve “Superintelligence” (Nick Bostrom), could pose “existential risks” that lead to “Our Final Hour” (Martin Rees). And Stephen Hawking recently made international headlines when he noted “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
But wait! Should we also ask what machines that think, or, “AIs”, might be thinking about? Do they want, do they expect civil rights? Do they have feelings? What kind of government (for us) would an AI choose? What kind of society would they want to structure for themselves? Or is “their” society “our” society? Will we, and the AIs, include each other within our respective circles of empathy?
Numerous Edgies have been at the forefront of the science behind the various flavors of AI, either in their research or writings. AI was front and center in conversations between charter members Pamela McCorduck (Machines Who Think) and Isaac Asimov (Machines That Think) at our initial meetings in 1980. And the conversation has continued unabated, as is evident in the recent Edge feature “The Myth of AI”, a conversation with Jaron Lanier, that evoked rich and provocative commentaries.
Is AI becoming increasingly real? Are we now in a new era of the “AIs”? To consider this issue, it’s time to grow up. Enough already with the science fiction and the movies, Star Maker, Blade Runner, 2001, Her, The Matrix, “The Borg”. Also, 80 years after Turing’s invention of his Universal Machine, it’s time to honor Turing, and other AI pioneers, by giving them a well-deserved rest. We know the history. (See George Dyson’s 2004 Edge feature “Turing’s Cathedral”.) So, once again, this time with rigor, the Edge Question—2015: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?
A good title sequence tells you everything you need to know about the world of a movie. As it unspools the credits for a given film, it can also convey the movie’s mood, its sense of place, its story’s theme and even a few of its plot points. Saul Bass invented the modern title sequence with Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm(1955). Consisting largely of moving white rectangles on a black background set to a jazzy score, the piece feels like a Blue Note record cover come to life – perfect for a gritty tale about heroin addiction. The opening was so striking that Hollywood took note and soon title sequences became the rage, especially ones made by Bass.
Above you can watch a long compilation of Saul Bass titles, starting with Man with the Golden Arm and ending with Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995). Along the way, the montage illustrates the evolution of style over the course of those 40 years, showing how titles grew in ambition and sophistication. You can see titles for some great films from the yawning spiral in Vertigo to the monochrome crumbling busts in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus to the abstract shots of neon in Casino.
But to really get a sense of Bass’s talents, look to some of the less famous movies he worked on. For Carl Forman’s The Victors (1963), a bleak, big-budget anti-war flick, Bass compressed European history from the end of WWI to the devastation of WWII into one masterful montage. At one point, still photos of Hitler giving a speech flash across the screen, each shot pushed closer in on his mouth than the last, before the sequence culminates in a series of explosions. It’s one of the most concise and eloquent retellings of history in cinema. And for the zany comedy Not with My Wife, You Don’t!, Bass created an animated green-eyed monster of jealousy playing a violin. Say what you will about contemporary movies, but there are definitely not enough cartoon green-eyed monsters of jealousy these days.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Mark Mothersbaugh’s studio is located in a cylindrical structure painted bright green — it looks more like a festive auto part than an office building. It’s a fitting place for the iconoclast musician. For those of you who didn’t spend your childhoods obsessively watching the early years of MTV, Mark Mothersbaugh was the mastermind behind the band Devo. They skewered American conformity by dressing alike in shiny uniforms and their music was nervy, twitchy and weird. They taught a nation that if you must whip it, you should whip it good.
In the years since, Mothersbaugh has segued into a successful career as a Hollywood composer, spinning scores for 21 Jump Streetand The Royal Tenenbaums among others.
In the video above, you can see Mothersbaugh hang out in his studio filled with synthesizers of various makes and vintages, including Bob Moog’s own personal Memorymoog. Watching Mothersbaugh pull out and play with each one is a bit like watching a precocious child talk about his toys. He just has an infectious energy that is a lot of fun to watch.
Probably the best part in the video is when he shows off a device that can play sounds backward. It turns out that if you say, “We smell sausage” backwards it sounds an awful lot like “Jesus loves you.” Who knew?
Below you can see Mothersbaugh in action with Devo, performing live in Japan during the band’s heyday in 1979.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
I envy book designers tasked with putting together covers for Philip K. Dick novels, and yet I don’t envy them. On one hand, they get the chance to visually interpret some of the most unusual, indescribable genre fiction ever written; on the other hand, they bear the burden of visually representing some of the most unusual, indescribable genre fiction ever written.
Dick wrote interesting books, to put it mildly, and as book-lovers know, certain countries’ publishing industries tend to put out more interesting book covers than others. So what happens at the intersection? Here we present to you a selection of Philip K. Dick covers from around the world, beginning with a Greek cover of his posthumously published novel Radio Free Albemuth that features the man himself, relaxing in his natural interplanetary environment beside his vintage radio.
That book put a barely fictional gloss on Dick’s own psychological experiences, as did Valis, whose Italian edition you also see pictured here. But his more fantastical novels, such as the I Ching-driven story of an America that lost the Second World War, have received equally compelling international covers, such as the one from Chile just above.
You can usually trust Japanese publishers to come up with book designs neither too abstract nor too literal for the contents within, as one of their editions of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said quite literally illustrates just above. And if you can rely on Japan for that sort of cover, you can rely on France for understatement; half the French novels I’ve seen have nothing on the front but the name of the work, the author, and the publisher, but behold how Dick’s untamed experimental spirit allowed Robert Laffont to cut loose:
But if you really want to see an unusual graphic design culture, you’ve got to look to Poland. We featured that country’s distinctive movie posters a few years ago, but their books also partake of the very same delightfully askew visual tradition, one I imagine that would have done Dick himself proudest. Below we have Polish cover art for Confessions of a Crap Artist, his novel of midcentury suburban strife, composed with materials few of us would have thought to use:
You can see 600+ international Philip K. Dick covers at philipkdick.com’s cover gallery, which has for some reason gone offline, but which mostly survives through the magic of the Internet Wayback Machine — a device Dick never imagined even in his farthest-out, trickiest-to-represent fantasies.
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